Studio711

The best times to take a photo are the hour after sunrise and the hour before sunset. You’ll get the best lighting and color in your shot. There’s a great app for photographer’s called “The Photographer’s Ephemeris.” You find on a map the spot that you want to photograph and select the day that you’ll be there and you get info about sunrise, sunset, and a visual diagram of the angle of the sun and moon.

Someday I might use this for photography, but I’ve been using it lately to figure out how the sun hits my yard at various times of the year. It can help you figure out where to locate your plants to get the right amount of sun. It’s also quite interesting to see just how much the angle of the sun varies between the summer and winter solstice.

They say when you buy a house, the three most important things are location, location and location. I have about a five minute drive to Home Depot so I’d say our location is pretty great! The people there are starting to recognize me, and well they should. Here’s a breakdown of my transactions at Home Depot since we moved got the house at the beginning of October.

• 72 total transactions consisting of 62 purchases and 10 returns. That’s one purchase every 3.5 days.
• I end up returning 7.5% (by dollar value) of the things I purchase
• There are only five weeks that I didn’t go to Home Depot. One of them was the cruise.
• The most purchases I’ve ever had in one week is six, and that has happened three times.
• The most purchases I’ve made in one day is three.
• Sunday is the most popular day for me to make a purchase, followed in order by Monday, Saturday, and Thursday.
• Home Depot stock has gone up 50% since we purchased our home and has risen to a 10 year high.

Tyla and I make good use of our Costco membership, but it’s becoming increasingly difficult. As Yogi Berra said, “That place is so busy nobody goes there anymore!” The Costco in Kirkland suffers from a number of logistical problems. First off, the entrance is at the wrong end of the building so you have to walk the entire length of the building almost anywhere you park just to get to the door. Secondly, parking is always terrible and it can be quarter mile walk just to got from your car to the door! To make this all worse, they are now carving up a big chunk of the parking lot to add a gas station. I had to swing by there so I went on a Wednesday at noon and I STILL had trouble finding parking. The lady at the register said that they only have about 400 parking spots available.

I mentioned this to Tim and he said that the Costco in Issaquah is expanding their gas station and adding a five story parking garage to alleviate the parking problems there. I feel like Kirkland is going to have to do something similar, but I don’t see any signs of that happening yet.

Is it possible for these stores to get so busy that people stop going there and they end up with fewer customers than before they expanded? Or do the busy parking lots make people feel like this place really is an incredible deal and make it even MORE popular? Personally, I’ve tried to stop going there Friday through Sunday because it’s just a complete madhouse.

On top of all this, I find it amazing how much this area loves Costco considering how much they hate Wal-Mart. I recognize that they are different stores with different business models and clientele, but they are certainly much more similar to each other than to something like Whole Foods. Why the love for Costco and the hatred of Wal-Mart? Southeast Bellevue is getting the area’s first Wal-Mart so we’ll see how that goes. I’m waiting for the civil war between Bellevue west (Nieman Marcus, Louis Vuitton, etc) and Bellevue east (strip malls from the 60s and Wal-Mart.)

It’s great to see businesses growing like this but it’s frustrating when I want to swing by Costco and pick up a case of beer at 25% less than I pay at the grocery store. Maybe there is some marketing/psychology dual major who can explain this all to me.

Tyla’s company operates a booth every year at the Kirkland 5k and they encourage their employees to run. This year Tyla, Chelsea, Nancy and Megan all ran. Tim and I watched from the side of the road and snapped some photos.

We gave nephew David a kid sized Camelbak for his 6th birthday, and it reminded me of a post I’ve been meaning to do for a while on how to properly clean a hydration pack. Before I met Tyla, I don’t know if I cleaned mine more than once or twice. Turns out she doesn’t like drinking moldy water. Who knew? We now have quite a few of these bladders and I’ve gotten a lot better at keeping them sanitary.

The big problem with these things is that if you crumple them up and throw them in a dark spot, they’re never going to dry out. It’s a petri dish. So the number one task after you use your Camelbak is to get it dried out. You can try sticking something inside like tongs to keep it propped open, but make sure you wrap paper towels around any metal so you don’t get rust inside. You can also break one leg off a plastic hanger and attempt to hang the bladder sideways. I ended up purchasing the hanger that you see in the photo. The hardest part is figuring out how to use it! I haven’t found anything better for getting it completely dry in a fairly short amount of time.

Camelbak officially recommends that if you’re using it regularly, you can just keep water in it, or you can get most of the water out and throw it in the freezer. That should keep you free from most bacteria. It looks like some of their new hydration packs even come with built in hangers!

You can also buy cleaning tablet and brushes specially made for cleaning out the main compartment. Camelbak also sells a lot of replacement parts so you if something gets too damaged or dirty, you can just replace it.

I feel like there are probably better hydration systems out there, but so far I’ve been content with our Camelbaks and we own a bunch of them. If you’re looking to save some money, there are a lot of websites and YouTube videos about alternative ways to dry and clean these things.

I think I can remember hearing my Mom say just about every one of these things except the things about texting and iPods. Those wouldn’t have made any sense. Here are the full lyrics if you don’t want to watch the video.

If you’ve ever been to our church and walked on the ramp up to Pastor’s office, you’ll know that it was sketchy at best. Over the years, the plywood ramp has been rotting from the top and the bottom and there were spots that I was afraid someone would fall through.

The whole project took about 5 hours start to finish, but it would have taken a LOT longer if Tim and Logan hadn’t been there. We decided to replace the plywood with cedar boards to match the rest of the deck. This should give the water a better place to drain in the future.

We started by removing the old plywood but that proved a lot harder than we had planned. It got a little easier when we broke out the circular saw and cut into smaller pieces that we could pry up. Thankfully the boards underneath were pressure treated lumber and were still in pretty good shape so we didn’t have to replace them.

From that point on it was a seemingly endless cycle of cutting boards and screwing them down. The ramp is about 23’ long and the tricky part was that the width varied almost constantly the whole way up due to some combination of odd original design and warping.

After one extra trip to Home Depot to buy a few more boards, we finished up a little after dark. We were very happy to get it done in one evening! We still need to fix the railing and seal the whole deck, but those things can wait a little while.